We learned in this chapter what the minimal steps are that are needed to create a working application which uses NHibernate as an ORM framework, and is able to write data to and read data from a database.
Specifically, we covered:
What the prerequisites are and how we need to configure our system to be able to develop applications that use NHibernate 3
How we can define a model and map this model to the underlying database by using Fluent NHibernate
How to make NHibernate automatically create a database schema for us
How we create a session factory and how to use this factory to create sessions, which in turn are used to persist data to and retrieve the existing data from the database
Now that we've learned how we can use NHibernate in a real world application, we're ready to dig deeper into the details of the various steps we presented. In the next chapter, we start with the definition of the model.